βucharest Urban League of photographers for the Balkans

...smell of mud and sulph, turistic artefacts belonging to the communist times, people from the rural of Romania, and the sun of the Baragan of Panait Istrati; these are the main ingredients of the Amara Lake's beach. It is a strange mixture of past and present; this could be disturbing for the turists, but it is interesting for photography. (Corneliu Sarion)

"No trees grow here, and it's so far from one water well to the next that you can die of thirst half-way. The inhabitant of Bărăgan constantly hopes that one day someone will come and teach him how to live better in the Bărăgan, in this dreadful wilderness where water is hidden in the deepest bowels of the earth and where nothing grows except thistles. They cover the land in less than a week. It's the only thing the Bărăgan will tolerate, except for the sheep who lust after these thistles and devour them greedily. Come winter, the shepherd abandons this God forsaken land and returns home. Then the Bărăgan dons its white fur coat and lays to rest for six months. Nothing lives here any more. That's the Bărăgan." (Panait Istrati, Ciulinii Bărăganului)

These photographs are part of a broader photographic project conducted with Dragos Radu Dumitrescu and Rafael Ianos (all BULB members in an exemplary common project) in Lespezi village, Constanta.

The village is inhabited mostly by ethnic Turks. As the title suggests, the photos do not have a documentary meaning, but they experiment a kind of "documenting" emotions, starting from the idea that if at first sight an image captures factuality (the objective reality of the facts), by interpreting this reality, using technical but mostly aesthetic instruments (available to the author), the author can access, in various degrees, the world beyond factual, the private "reality" of each of us, the world of emotions and affections.